"With his Fourth Symphony," Niltolaus Harnoncourt once observed, "Schubert set out to open up a whole new world in symphonic writing." Unfortunately this verv work - to which the composer later gave the title "Tragic" - still suffers from certain fixed ideas which tend, rather, to limit its particular significance. Iu the l9th century, it was felt to occupv an intermediate stage in Schubert's development, "a transition to something larger and greater". Among the reasons adduced for this view were external factors, including the composer's first symphonic use of a minor tonalitv, the instrumental resources on which he calls and the fact that he had recently given up teaching.
Above all, howerer, the work was said to mark the beginning of a conscious attempt on his part to come to terms with Beethoven's symphonic style. Its title and tonality ("Beethoven’s C minor" - as though C minor were Beethoven’s exclusive preserve) have ensured that Schubert's Fourth Symphony has always been regarded as a work which, to quote Alfred Einstein, reveals the extent to which its composer was "disturlbed by Beethoven". With this judgement ringing in their ears, far too many writers and listeners have found that their minds are made up in advance Schubert is said to hare been unable to meet the expectations of listeners keen to hear "genuine Beethovenian tragedy" and, although still only nineteen years old, has been reproached for the fact that his "Tragic" Symphony did not aim to create a sense of drama in its thematic and motivic writing, a drama achieved by treating the entry of the recapitulation as the climax of the symphony's first movement or by ensuring that the final movement was the culmination of the four-movement structure as a whole. "Beethoven fought with the spirit, Schubert merely suspected its existence" was one of the comparative judgements passed on the composer "Defiance became pain, lamentation and lyrical playfulness" was another.
Far more instructive than any attempt to posit parallels with Beethoven is the fact, first, that the composer's Fourth Symphony is a radically different work from his Fifth, in spite of the fact that both were written within a few months of each other in 1816 and, second, that during the ten months between the completion of the Third Symphony in July 1815 and his work on the Fourth in April 1816 Schubert wrote some 190 importat songs, to say nothing of a good two dozen works in other genres - an oratorio, a mass, several Singspiels, choruses, chamber music for strings, and piano pieces. The radically innovative features that characterised Schubert's lieder writing and placed him in the avant-garde among composers of his own day are also found in his handling of large-scale symphonic form, with the result that the Fourth Symphony is anything but traditionally hidebound. What is emphatically new about this work is the way in which it opens up deeper layers of expression on a plane which, no longer merely private, is now necessarily universal. Within the context of Schubert's symphonies, the Fourth is the first example of the composer portraying general - one might almost say social - conflicts.
In the course of a conversation held during one of his rehearsals, Harnoncourt attempted to define this qualitatively novel aspect and to qualify speculations on the question of the work's title: "I know that all the thoughts that one may have in this respect can help us to understand a work better. I, too, ask myself these questions, I'm interested in what Schubert was reading at this time, what he heard, what may have impressed him. In other words, I try to see his works within the context of his life. But when I perform these works, this knowledge and understanding exist only somewhere in my unconscious. They no doubt affect my interpretation, but not on a conscious level. Schubert knew a lot of what Beethoven had written, and I know that it left a very deep impression on him; he knew every note of Mozart's music that could be heard at that time, and I know that it all affected him profoundly, also that he suffered from the knowledge that inferior music can be hugely successful. I'm absolutely certain that all these impressions produced reactions in his imagination." When asked about the description of the work as Schubert's "Tragic" Symphony, Harnoncourt replies: "I like things that are inscrutable, and I harbour doubts about everything that isn’t. When someone says, 'I've discovered something,' I always think that it could be completely different."
But Harnoncourt is sure that the idea as a whole is intimately bound up with what is actually expressed in this symphony, not only in terms of its overall structure hut also on the level of every last detail - details which, seemingly insignificant, are none the less decisive: "The interlinking of the different movements - above all the first and last - is tremendous. It's even taken to the point where the movements could he interchangeable. The solution to the problem of the hopeless, desperate, disconsolate situation is repeated three times before the recapitulation in the second part of the final movement and explains why this broken triad on the bassoons (which was played by only one bassoon in Schubert's original version, rather than by the whole bass group, including the cellos) is now suddenly in the major. This upswing to the major gives the whole of the final movement’s development section a tremendous sense of blissful happiness. Even given the feeling of tragedy and hopelessness that had previously dominated the movement, there is now, so to speak, a window that can be opened on happiness - if only for a moment. It can't always remain open, but it exists, And that's very important. For me, Schubert is always sad, even in the Fifth Symphony, always. But in all his grief there is also always momentary brightness elsewhere. Wliat makes his grief so powerful in its impact is that behind the grief lies happiness, lies something bright, something sunny. something wonderful."

Mendelssohn, too, struggled to come to terms with Beethoven's symphonic legacy, but in his case the battle was fought in the field of the concert overture, with its literary orientation, a genre that he once defined in a letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter as something which, in a sense, did not belong to “actual, i.e., musical music". Symphonic programme music was still in its infancy in 1833. Berlioz had recently written his Symphonie fantastique, but it was not until two decades later that Franz Liszt coined the term "symphonic poem". Yet, even if the basic conditions of the new genre were not to be formulated until much later, Mendelssohn's concert overture to Die schöne Melusine fulfils at least one of those conditions - the congruence of form and content - in wellnigh ideal fashion. Whereas plot-based narratives often lack the recapitulations that are necessary from the point of view of musical form, it is the reestablishment of the initial situation that constitutes the essential point of the Melusine story: the nymph emerges from the watery element to become the mistress of her knight and the mother of ten human children, and it is to the water that she must return at the end when her secret is revealed.
The literary source even lent itself to what, since Beethoven, had heen the obligatory contrast hetween the principal musical ideas and the depiction of the conflicts derived from them, with the musical argument following the fairy tale's dramaturgical structure right down to the very last detail. From the outset we are confronted by two contrastive worlds, the “real world" of the knight and of chivalry’s ceremonial processions characterised by energetic and impassioned motifs, in contrast to the serpent-woman's wondrous, fantastical world, with the lyricism of what Schumann termed in "demonic wave-like figures". The hope that love may yet reconcile these opposites gives wav to a feeling of hopelessness. Whereas the themes - and characters - had initially been presented juxtaposed and in sequence, the motivic contrmts that are now introduced are increasingly dense and interactive, finally leading to the peripeteia in the form of the lovers' sad separation, which is fullv motivated both dramatically and musically. It is clear from all this why Mendelssohn, in a letter to his sister Fanny should have felt the need to distance himself from Conradin Kreutzer's opera Melusine, an acclaimed performance of which he attended in 1833: "The overture, I mean Kreutzer's, was encored, but I disliked it quite particularly [...]; I then felt a desire to write an overture that people wouldn't encore but would receive more inwardly, so I took what I liked of the subject (and that corresponds exactly with the fairy tale)."

“Roberts mind", Clara Schumann noted in lier diary on Whit Sunday 1841, "is currently much preoccupied; he began a new symphony yesterday that is intended to comprise a single movement but to contain an Adagio and a finale.” The D minor Symphony was completed later that same year, a year of symphonic experiments that also witnessed the composition of the first version of what was to become Schumann's A minor Piano Concerto, to which he gave the title “Fantasy for piano and orchestra" on account of its irregular form. It was for precisely this reason that, a whole decade later, he toyed with the idea of using the title “Symphonistic Fantasy" for a work that he had in the meantime revised as his Fourth Symphony and which had been conceived from the outset as a through-composed and unified cycle of movements rather than as the usual four-movement work.
The recapitulations that may be said to invest the movements of a traditional four-movement work with a sense of internal stability are now replaced by a network of reminiscences that cut across the movements' boundaries, while the individual movements remain open-ended both formally and harmonically. In this way, the listener's awareness of the usual recapitulations is intensified and extends to the work as a whole: the repeat of the introduction in the Romanze and the twofold reminiscence of the main ideas of the opening movement prepare the way for the third and tinal return of the introduction, as though - to quote the composer August Halm - "the symphony were celebrating itself".
The work was sketched with exemplary speed in the space of a little more than a month - the draft is dated 7 June 1841, the eve of Schumann’s 31st birthday - but the laborious task of instrumenting it proved unusually time-consuming, and it was not until 9 September 1841 that the task was finally completed, with Schumann devoting himself to other, more urgent work during the intervening months, including reading the proofs of both his First Symphony and Fantasy for piano and orchestra and writrng the text of what was to be his principal cantata, Das Paradies und die Peri. In short, the D minor Symphony was not completed under any real pressure, not least because the composer was prevented from working upon it with any real concentration. Indeed, this may have been one of the reasons for Schumann's dissatisfaction with the work's initial version. But even the first performance - by Clara Schumann - failed to satisfy him, rn spite of a favourable press. The fact that the evening's main event had turned out to be Liszt's surprise involvement in the proceedings may additionally have persuaded Schumann to leave the work unpublished.
It was Johannes Brahms who, following Schumann's death, spoke out against the determined resistance of the cornposer's widow and, advancing the claims of the earlier version, resolutely and actively saw it into print. Described as a "first revision", the full score was finally published in 1891, exactly fifty years after the work's completion.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt has always fiercely chmpioned this initial version of the work, and the best possible argument in its favour is his recording of it with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, a recording that sweeps aside all reservations on the subject (Teldec 4509-90867-2). Tempi, timbre and the detailed handling of the agogic markings especially in the transitional passages between the individual phrases, sections, formal divisions and, finally, between the individual movements attest to the independent merits of this initial version, with its translucent chamber-like-textures.
None the less, Harnoncourt has no wish to be tied down to this early version. With the present recording he is able to demonstrate the inconrparable and unique merits of the definitive final version with this equally personal interpretation. In the course of our conversation during the rehearsals, he told me: "It was always part of my plan to be able to place the two versions side by side, I'd like to stress that once again. My inner freedom is far greater than people give me credit for. Even at the tirne that I recorded the first version, I was already interested in the second one, and the first one still interests me just as much as before.” This is not simply a question of either/or, Harnoncourt insists and draws upon an argument which, for all its apparent simplicity, is none the less compelling: one can learn to understand each version better by studying the other one. "By knowing what Schumann wrote in 1841, I'm in a better position to understand many of the decisions he took - this again became clear during our present rehearsals. I'm thinking, for exarnple, of the transitions between the movements, but also of certain rhythms and bass passages, such as one in the first version, where the bass consciously enters half a bar too late. The second version is both more complex and more straightforward, but at all events it is somehow more monumental." This is also related in Harnoncourt's mind to the opposition between "freshness" and "maturity" that is generally associated with Schumann: "Of crucial importance to him was the initial `idea’. Later he became the great expert who was able to husband his resources and to impose a new form on the whole vast idea of this symphony; which is really his second symphony. This, too, has a real sense of greatness to it."
The question as to why Brahms and Clara Schumann were so irreconcilably opposed to the other version is one that llarnoncourt considers worth asking, yet he believes that ultimately it is of only academic interest. In the case of Brahrns, he suspects that the first version “may perhaps have attracted him on account of its freshness and colourfulness. And then Brahms may have regarded the second version an perhaps coming close to his own symphonies, even if only because of its size. Perhaps he may even have thought of it as something of a rival. I don't know. You know, it's difficult to reconstruct someone else's thoughts. It's wrong to be over-confident. It could be completely different.”